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I’ve seen the impact of leadership development on organizations: it’s why I joined PM College. One of the challenges is to determine which methods work best to drive transformation, or accelerate improvements one has already reaped. Our firm has experience and research that pins this down, but it’s always nice to find a third-party that confirms what we know and believe.

… the responses to our latest survey on the topic suggest that organizations, to perform at their best, now focus on a different set of capabilities and different groups of employees to develop.

In other words, the best performers did personnel development differently.

What did they do? The first finding that struck me was the use — or disuse — of experiential learning: McKinsey model factories or simulations as examples. The most effective organizations used these methods more than four times more frequently than others. But even then, experiential learning was used sparingly, by just under a quarter of the top performers.

As long-time Crossderry readers know, I’m a big fan of simulations. We had great experience with them at SAP. As McKinsey notes, they are about the only way “to teach adults in an experimental, risk-free environment that fosters exploration and innovation.” To that end, several popular PM College offerings — Managing by Project, its construction-specific flavor, and Leadership in High Performance Teams — use simulations to bring project and leadership challenges alive…without risking real initiatives.

I’ll have more on other success factors — custom content and blended delivery — in following posts.

[The study delivers] a tough, but needed, message. HR leaders get thrown under the bus for these projects too often, which leads them to reach for visible, but ineffective, change implementation tactics.

To that end, I really like the point about realism re: expectations. Many change initiatives are heavy on marketing-style communications, which are easy to produce and point to as a tangible work product. But they’re often only one-way messages about how great the Brave New World will be. A multi-layered stakeholder management approach is a lot tougher, requires sustained effort over time, and has less-tangible payback.

Ultimately, function and process leaders need to own the change initiatives for their areas, which is why CEO ownership and involvement — again, sustained over time — is so critical. Line managers and staff won’t respond if it’s just a speech, new PowerPoint templates, and a monthly newsletter. They will wait until the change project is noticed, measured, and rewarded by the leadership team.

The methodology topic is a great one to use when interviewing potential change management consultants. My experience is that there’s a large group of “change” consultants who are merely rebranded MarCom (marketing communications) types.

Challenge them to give you an example of how they used a change methodology.

Bonus points if they can discuss how they integrated it with another framework (e.g., project or implementation methods).

I’ve found that other functions struggle with innovative technology when:

They don’t know their processes particularly well. In this scenario, discussions about a mere port to a new platform get stuck on basic process misunderstandings.

They try to jam existing processes on a new platform without considering new opportunities the technology brings. It’s a reasonable implementation strategy to simply port processes, However, if one doesn’t account for new cases — e.g., using mobile form factors to present demos or quote and approve in real-time — one may inadvertently foreclose those opportunities via short-sighted design choices.

They deploy new process cases without a organizational change strategy beyond training. Take my CRM example above: if one’s sales force is made up of “order takers”, will they be able to leverage the new capabilities without intervention? If nothing else, one must ensure that debriefs of the top performers in this new capability happen and are passed along (via training, coaching, etc.).

Adapted from a comment I made on LinkedIn on this ZDNet post by Sven Denecken, noting some concrete reasons why digital innovation is disruptive:

When Vladimir Lenin posed this question in 1901, socialism was riven. Most early Marxists believed that the core prediction of Marx’s theory — an inevitable proletarian revolution — was just around the corner. But by the turn of the 20th century, the revolution appeared farther away than ever. If anything, the contradictions among the classes were cooling in advanced capitalist states, not boiling over.

So why the two-bit summary of a turn-of-the-20th century dispute among socialists? Simply this: Lenin’s pamphlet paved the path for revolutionaries around the world. As I was noodling on The Meaning of #Stoos, I re-read it and picked out a few things that change agents can learn from Lenin:

Sunrise was the name of the project that separated our IT systems and infrastructure from our former corporate parent. IMO it was an excellent name because a sunrise is the tangible start of a “new day”, which the projected provided for our company.

[Company Name] 2001 was a common turn of the millenium project name, but one that didn’t wear well. For example, many of these projects didn’t finish in 2001, as global rollouts continued on for several years. Many colleagues felt silly trying to wrap up “2001” in “2004”. If you’re going to “date” a project, then make sure your plan doesn’t run past that date.

Phoenix sounds cool, but it should be used carefully. It isn’t just a myth of renewal, but a Continue reading →

Like this:

Still cleaning out the “blog ideas” attic and found this gem. In this speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Gen. David Petraeus presented the Iraq surge as an organizational change problem. He has clearly lived the change process, both in theory and practice:

[T]here are four steps to institutional change. First, you have to get the big ideas right–you have to determine the right overarching concepts and intellectual underpinnings. Second, you have to communicate the big ideas effectively throughout the breadth and depth of the organization. Third, you have to oversee implementation of the big ideas–in this case, first at our combat training centers and then in actual operations. And fourth, and finally, you have to capture lessons from implementation of the big ideas, so that you can refine the overarching concepts and repeat the overall process.

This last step — integration of lessons learned into the change process — is the wisdom here, IMO. Strong performance feedback reinforces the successes of organizational change and remedies dysfunctional elements that threaten the change. Everyone gets the idea that “the side that learns and adapts the fastest often prevails”, which is an effective sound bite to help sell lessons learned. Closing the loop creates, then reinforces, this virtuous circle of learning and adaptation.